The state government has decided to cleanse and update the existing database of vehicles registered in Bengal to understand the existing count.
Several thousands of vehicles do not ply the roads or have been already scrapped. Still, they continue to add up to the existing figures of registered vehicles on the database.
“When one decides to draw up a policy on state transportation, the number of registered vehicles in the state remains the key deciding factor. If this number is erroneous, then the calculations will go wrong,” said a senior official of the finance department.
With the state government struggling to reach a consensus on the actual count, the transport department issued a circular a few days back instructing all regional transport authorities to rectify the anomalies in the database “emergently.”
“It is learnt that a large number of anomalous vehicular data exist in the VAHAN database, thereby, making their utility as a tool for administrative interventions questionable,” the circular, signed by Saumitra Mohan, transport secretary, read.
“These anomalies need to be rectified emergently through a methodical data-cleaning exercise ...” the circular states.
Vahan is a data repository of all vehicles registered
in the country.
The immediate concern is drawing up a count of vehicles that are older than 15 years and are registered at different regional transport offices — including Calcutta — and need to be scrapped, senior officials in the transport department said.
The state government has decided that old commercial vehicles would be targeted followed by private ones.
The scrapping will be carried out in three phases. In the first, vehicles registered between January 1, 1970 and December 31, 1991, will be brought under the scanner.
The second phase will involve vehicles that are older than 15 years and registered between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2004.
The final phase will target those registered between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2007. Figures reveal that 1,30,046 vehicles in Calcutta and 20,136 in Howrah were registered between January 1, 1970 and December 31, 1991.
Out of the total, 66,217 vehicles in Calcutta and 211 in Howrah had duplicate registrations with other regional transport offices, thus their registrations could be cancelled, which is a mandatory step for scrapping.
“Unless there is a deep cleaning of the database, we can’t completely phase out old vehicles,” a transport department official said.
The circular spells out multiple categories of data, including anomalies on the registration date, purchase date and the data of sale value of a vehicle, that will have to be scrutinised while cleansing the Vahan data.
In December, the state government had introduced a waiver scheme for pending road tax penalties and the timeline was extended to March 31 from February 29.
“But there was a gross error. The total collected amount was close to Rs 500 crores against an expected figure of over Rs 2,000 crores. Because of duplicate registration of vehicles, the vehicle count was wrong,” the official said.